Glossary · Trust

What Is a Hash-Chained Audit Log?

The Voz360 audit log is a hash-chained record of every privileged action: each row is SHA-256 chained to the row before it, written under a row lock, so any tampering breaks the chain and is immediately detectable.

The problem with an ordinary audit table

A standard audit log is just a table of rows. Anyone with sufficient database access — an administrator, an attacker who compromises credentials — can edit or delete a row and leave no trace that it happened.

How hash chaining fixes that

In a hash-chained log, each new row’s hash is computed over its own content plus the previous row’s hash. That makes every row cryptographically dependent on every row before it. Change one historical row’s content, and its hash no longer matches what the next row expects — the chain breaks at that exact point.

Why row locking matters

Writing to a hash chain safely under concurrent access requires that two privileged actions cannot compute their hash against the same "previous row" at the same time. Voz360 writes chain rows under a row lock (FOR UPDATE) specifically to prevent that race condition from corrupting the chain order.

What verification looks like

A verification pass reads the chain from the first row forward, recomputing each hash and comparing it against the stored value. Any mismatch identifies the exact row where history diverges from what the chain proves should be there.

The practical test

Can the vendor tell you — in one sentence — which of their AI capabilities are rule-based, which are generative, and which are still roadmap?

Questions, answered

What enterprise buying teams want to know.

Self-contained answers, so the questions a security or procurement reviewer asks first don't require reading the whole page.

Does a hash-chained audit log prevent tampering, or just detect it?

It detects tampering after the fact — it makes tampering evident rather than physically impossible. Combined with access controls that limit who can write to the underlying table, it raises the bar significantly for undetected historical edits.

What happens if a legitimate correction needs to be made to history?

The chain design means historical rows should not be edited at all; corrections are typically appended as new rows referencing the original, preserving the original record and the chain integrity.

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